


Red as God

by orphan_account



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 14:07:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time she's seventeen, Pepper has gained four scars, three years' worth of nightmares, a fear of motorbikes, and a knowledge that something terrible is going to happen, or already happened. Or is happening right now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red as God

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from a short story, 'Blue as God', from the anthology The Curiosities.

When Pepper is thirteen, a woman moves into the house next to her, and she screams at the Them through her windows. 

Of course, she is not the first adult to scream at the Them, nor will she be the last, so it takes a while to realize she's yelling out of terror rather than anger. Even so, she's speaking in Spanish anyway and she's incredibly old and her eyes are too bright, so she's probably crazy.

("But she ain't a witch," Adam tells them. "I asked Anathema. She's not tryin' to hurt us."

"Just 'cause she's not a witch doesn't mean she's not tryin' to hurt us," Pepper says darkly. "’Sides, you don't speak Spanish. You don't know what she's sayin'." 

"My mum speaks Spanish," Wensley says. "I'll ask her."

But he never does.)

It takes even longer to figure out she's only screaming at Adam- when Brian and Wensley come by, or when Pepper passes the old lady's house on the way to her own, she's silent. But when Adam comes around, the woman goes completely around the bend. 

Pepper doesn't really notice, or care, so she doesn't tell.

One day, though, when Pepper is heading to school, the old woman pops out of the bushes and grabs her arm. Pepper doesn't scream, of course not, but she does yelp a little and stumble and almost fall. The woman holds her up by her arm, with surprising strength for a wisp of a woman whose only real body mass is her long white hair.

"You, girl," she says, in halting English, "you beware of hijo del diablo, boy with yellow hair. He swallow you up, like snake swallows mouse." 

And she disappears back into her house. Pepper stares after her, holding her arm where it has begun to bleed.

She does tell the Them about that one, amused in the retelling, and Brian and Wensley laugh and laugh till their sides hurt and tears swim in their eyes. Adam rolls his eyes once they're gone giggling, but he looks pleased with himself.

Still, though, something does not seem funny about it. Pepper looks up hijo del diablo. She deletes her Internet history afterwards. 

The old woman dies the next year, but Pepper's arm never completely heals. She keeps four crescent-shaped scars on her upper arm, from where the old woman's nails bit into her skin.

xxx

At fourteen, Pepper starts having nightmares. 

Pepper does not scare easily. It's a simple fact. But these nightmares are unsettling, because they feel really real, and sometimes Pepper can't remember when she wakes up if they're really dreams or memories. 

She doesn't tell the Them, because mostly the Them are in the dreams, Adam especially, and because they'd make fun of her. But the dreams keep coming. 

Anathema and her boyfriend show up in them sometimes. They don't do much, but they always have very scared looks on their faces.

A couple of times, she dreams about two men, who weren't really men, whose bodies fell away and had wings where their skin had been. She wakes up in a cold sweat. 

The most prominent is the red woman, the red woman with the sword. 

Pepper sees her the clearest, in her mind- all white teeth and red hair and holding a sword up to Pepper's face. "Mano a mano?" she says.

She's beautiful, but she scares Pepper more than any of the other things she dreams about.

Well. Most of the other things. 

(Adam sits in the middle of the gulley, tearing up grass stalks, with the other Them in a circle around him. Brian is blowing the puffy seeds off dandelions, and Pepper and Wensley are doing their homework. More accurately, Wensley is doing Pepper's homework while Pepper pretends to look on.

Eventually Adam looks up, pausing in ripping up the grass. He sees Pepper staring at him and frowns. "What?" he says. 

Pepper starts, blinking. "Nothing," she says."

Adam looks at her for a moment longer, then shrugs and returns to his grass stalks. Brian sniggers, and Pepper kicks at him until he grunts and shies away from her.)

Adam has black eyes when she dreams about him, and he makes the sky turn dark. 

xxx

Pepper is fifteen when Adam kisses her.

It's not like it's the first time a boy had kissed her, or tried to- Greasy Johnson had tried to kiss her once, and he had ended up with a broken arm and she with two months in detention. (It would've been more if she hadn't been yelling about sexual assault until the principal begged her to keep her voice down.) Wensley had kissed her for real, but he had pulled away and blushed and stammered after just half a second. She had stared at him as he turned red and apologized over and over, and in the end, she hadn't been able to say anything to him. She and Wensley never spoke of it again.

Adam kisses her under a tree, for real. He kisses her as though he knows what he's doing, as though he's kissed other girls before. As though he's not afraid she'll pull away. 

He closes his eyes, but Pepper keeps hers open.

Then he pulls away and stares at Pepper for a long time. She stares back. His eyes are big and solemn, and she intends to wait out his silence, but in the end it gets to her.

"What?" she says at last. 

"You taste like dirt," he says. 

Her mouth falls open. "I do not," she says furiously, "that was you-"

He kisses her again. 

They both taste like dirt. 

xxx

When the Them are sixteen, Adam gets a motorbike. 

It's sleek and black and very very amazing, and Brian and Wensley are as jealous as they could possibly be. Pepper pretends to be jealous too, but really she doesn't like it at all. 

They make her nightmares worse- her mother had told her they'd go away as she got older, but they only got more and more vivid with time. And the motorbike creates a new element to them- suddenly, the red woman has a motorbike, and there's more - things? people? - like her in the dreams. 

And there is a tall dark rider, with his bike exactly like Adam's new one, who was huge and dark and terrible. And Adam is in the dreams again, and the dark rider talks to him like they're old friends. 

Adam with that motorbike is not a good thing. Pepper's almost sure of it, nightmares or not.

But when Adam pulls into her driveway and asks her if she wants a ride, and calls her chicken when she says she doesn't, it's too early, go away- well, there's very little she can do. She swings her legs over the bike and wraps her arms around Adam's waist, and her mother's screaming is drowned out by the engine. 

Riding feels like flying when you close your eyes, and Pepper keeps hers squeezed shut, her face buried against Adam's shoulder and back. It feels like you could keep on going forever, keep on driving until you open your eyes and you're somewhere completely new and different. Adam is vibrating with the bike, and she is too, pressed against him, and she wonders if this is how the red woman feels, powerful like this. 

Or maybe the kind of powerful Adam with the black eyes felt, making a thunderstorm. 

("…seems to me everyone's goin' to be a lot happier if they forget about this. Not actually forget, just not remember exactly.")

Pepper doesn't open her eyes until the bike stops. Adam shifts slightly, and she loosens her grip on him, but neither of them rise from their perch on the seat. After a moment, Pepper lifts her head from his shoulder and looks around.

They're under a tree, presumably in Tadfield, with long grass all around them and a crushed path where Adam had pulled up. It looks like every other place Adam has loved.

Adam turns around on the seat to look at her. "You're crying," he says. 

"What? Shut up, no ’m not," Pepper says, reaching for her face, but Adam gets there first. He draws a finger away from her cheek, a wet tear sitting on the tip. Pepper stares at it, uncertainly.

("You've got to help me sort it out.)

"Are you scared?" Adam asks. It's not mocking or teasing, the way the question should be asked, and Pepper doesn't understand why.

"No," she mutters, looking away. "’Course not, why would I be?"

She's lying.

He just frowns at her, then kisses her, careful. 

Pepper kisses him back. Hijo del diablo, she thinks. Hijo del diablo. 

It's all a jumbled mess in her mind now, and she's trying to sort out dreams and what might be memories but she can't, she can’t, there's something in her head that won't let her remember- and she wonders vaguely how she can have so many nightmares about Adam and still kiss him back, still climb onto the back of his death-black motorbike and close her eyes. 

Maybe she was more of a Pippin Galadriel Moonchild than a Pepper, after all.

The thought makes her slightly nauseous.

Even so. Here they are.

The scars in her upper arm sting.

xxx

Seventeen. Brian tells them he wants to join the military. 

"Why?" Wensley asks, more curious than rude. 

Brian scratches the back of his head. "I dunno," he says. "My uncle's in it, and I've always thought about, you know, signing up. It seemed like, I guess, the ma-"

"If you say it seemed like the manly thing to do, I swear I will kick you in the balls," Pepper says. "And you can tell me how manly that feels." 

Brian chuckles, but agreeably doesn't finish his sentence. He glances at Adam from his seat behind Pepper, then quickly looks away. 

Wensley crosses his legs. "Well," he says brightly, "that'll be good then, if that's really what you want to do. Have you told your parents?"

Pepper looks behind her. On his faded and cracked milk carton seat, Adam's eyes are stormy. 

"My dad thinks it's something I 'should pursue further,'" Brian says, with finger quotes. "My mom hates it though, she keeps cryin' and sayin' I'm gonna get killed."

Little boys, purrs a red voice in Pepper's head. Little boys with their little guns. 

Pepper's face twists. Stop it, she thinks to herself. There's been enough of nightmares, and the red woman, and a backwards fear of Adam, after all these years. She refuses to think about it in the daylight. 

It takes a minute to realize the other Them have fallen silent, looking at her scrunched expression. She blinks. 

"You okay, Pep?" Wensley asks cautiously. 

She scowls. "'M fine," she says reluctantly, and the atmosphere eases. 

Adam's knee pushes gently into her back.

xxx

Pepper is still seventeen.

"I want to go to college," she tells Adam, a little timidly. Then she rewords herself, more firmly. "I'm going to go to college. I've been accepted, and..."

She trails off, apprehensively. Adam is silent. 

She doesn't say where she's been accepted, because it doesn't matter. There are no colleges in Tadfield, or Lower Tadfield, or Norton. There weren't any colleges anywhere near any of those places either.

"Wensley has too," she says, looking to direct the silence away from herself. "Been accepted. And- and-"

"Do you really want to leave?" Adam asks. 

Pepper shifts from foot to foot. "I-" she says. "Not- I'm-"

"Oh," Adam says, as though she's explained herself. He looks thoughtful. He's sitting against the motorbike, his hair thin and gold in the sunlight, and he's really quite beautiful. 

But Pepper's not really thinking about that right now. 

"It's not anything to do with you," she says desperately. "It's just-" They're all getting older, things can't stay like this, they won't be young forever- "I have to do something," she finishes lamely. 

Adam nods, but he's looking down at the ground, deep in thought. Pepper doesn't know if she should wait or run.

She waits.

Finally Adam looks up. "I don't think it was supposed to be like this," he says. "This isn't how I meant it to happen. Maybe I did it wrong." He's frowning. "Maybe we should have stayed young."

His voice is calm enough, but his eyes are dark. There's a clap of thunder in the distance, and Pepper's knees go weak. She thinks she might faint. 

I am not a Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, she thinks to herself, and she runs. 

xxx

Still seventeen. Pepper, left with little alternative, goes to Anathema. 

She raps on the cottage door, very fast, very urgent. She doesn't know what kind of business a witch gets up to on Saturdays, and not sure she wants to know, but she needs help. 

Anathema's boyfriend answers the door. "Oh," he says, his eyes lighting in recognition. "You're that little girl who-"

Pepper glares at him, and he shuts up. 

Anathema pushes past him, appearing in the doorframe. "Who's- oh." She eyes Pepper warily. "You're Adam's friend, aren't you? Piper?"

"Pepper," says Pepper, and here she stalls. Anathema is Adam's friend, after all, not hers, and for the first time, fear that Adam would know she had been here strikes her. And even now, at seventeen, Pepper still believes with one hundred percent certainty that Anathema really is a witch, a real one, and the prospect is not entirely welcome all of a sudden. 

"Well?" says Anathema, sounding irritated.

"Hijo del diablo," Pepper blurts out. 

Anathema stares at her.

"I'll make us some tea," says Anathema's boyfriend hurriedly, and he disappears back into the cottage.

Anathema leans against the doorframe, crosses her arms and sighs. "Well," she says. "I suppose you ought to come in."

xxx

"This is Newt, by the way," Anathema says, gesturing to the man setting down tea in front of them. "We're-"

"Sorry, but I don't care," Pepper says.

"Typical," Newt mutters.

Anathema takes a sip of her tea. "Hijo del diablo," she says. "Now where did you hear that?"

"There was an old woman who lived next door to me, a long time ago," Pepper says distantly. "She used to yell that at Adam. I looked up what it means, but I never really-"

She looks down at the teacup. "Is it true?" she asks quietly.

Anathema looks closely at her. "I thought you didn't remember."

Pepper's heart sinks. "I don't. I mean, I didn't, but I had nightmares and then Adam-"

"You must be very stubborn, being able to see through a block like that," Anathema says. "Have you ever considered occultism?"

"Anathema," Newt says reproachfully. 

Pepper shakes her head, frustrated. "Then it really happened," she says. "I didn't just- imagine it."

"What do you remember?" Anathema asks, more gently.

"The red woman," Pepper says immediately. "And... motorbikes. And you two were there. And Adam had black eyes, and he made a thunderstorm happen... and there was a tall thing on a black motorbike that talked to him. And two men, only they weren't men, their skin fell off and they had wings. And Adam..."

She frowns. "Adam made us all forget," she says, uncertainly. "Because... we were afraid? I dunno. I don't remember."

Anathema and Newt exchange glances. "Yes," Anathema says. "All those things happened. If not in that order. But I'm surprised you were able to remember all of that. Even I have difficulty sometimes."

Pepper shakes her head. "It used to just be dreams," she says. "But it got worse when-"

She falls silent, and Anathema doesn't push it. She does lean forward, though, her hands still wrapped around her teacup. "What I'm wondering," she says, "is why you would come here now. Clearly these visions have been bothering you for a while."

Pepper takes a sip of the tea. "Adam's unhappy," she says. "Because we're- Brian an' Wensley an' me- we're all leaving. And he started saying things, and I-"

She looks up at the two of them. Newt looks startled, but Anathema is still watching her intently. 

"I don't want Adam to do anything bad," she says. "But I don't want to lose him. Or for him to change, like he did then."

This seems to confuse Anathema for a moment; she frowns, and looks down between her tea and the cups and the table and Pepper, searching for an answer.

Then Newt says, "Are you in love with him?" 

Pepper jumps, and Anathema's head snaps up, searching Pepper's face. "Oh my God," Anathema says faintly. "You are, aren't you? You love him."

Pepper shifts again, not sure what to say.

Newt whispers something to Anathema, whose eyes widen. She hits him. "Why didn't you say that when she came in?"

She looks at Pepper again, then sighs and leans back in her chair. "Okay," she says. "This won't end well."

It doesn't.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always loved the Them dynamic of Good Omens, and especially Pepper as a character, and always meant to write an exploration of what might have happened to her after the events of the book. Maybe this isn't what I meant it to be, but I enjoyed writing it and hope you enjoyed reading it.


End file.
